


crimson and hinges

by chromestorm



Category: Person of Interest (TV), The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Crossover, F/F, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-03-16 07:13:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3479096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chromestorm/pseuds/chromestorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows exactly what’s going to happen next, and Root smiles to herself as she sits cross-legged from the comfort of the bed in her room. The Ark is a failing prison and freedom is merely one incarceration away; it’s so close and she has known about, deliberated, and planned for this very moment for weeks.</p><p>It takes the security guards another three minutes to reach her, and when they do all she does is offer both hands out for them to cuff and say:</p><p>“You found me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [twit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/twit/gifts), [aelysian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelysian/gifts).



> i'm trash and this won't leave my head so who am i to fight it, right? characters from poi and the 100 will be tagged accordingly once i feel like they're sufficiently relevant to the story. (to root tbh)
> 
> many thanks to twit and viv for fact-checking and beta work. 
> 
> (title is from Novo Amor and Ed Tullett - Faux.)
> 
> also: extra thanks to twit for indulging all the crazy plans and for adding onto it. and a very special mention and thank you to aelysian for supporting this and encouraging me to produce words, even though she hasn't watched a single episode of the 100. this is for you two. (and me, obviously. but definitely also you two.)

There are alarms blaring all around her, the sound of it deafening and echoing off the muted chrome walls of her station.

She knows exactly what’s going to happen next, and Root smiles to herself as she sits cross-legged from the comfort of the bed in her room, excited but feeling more at ease than she ever has in the past two years. The Ark is a failing prison and freedom is merely one incarceration away; it’s so _close_ and she has known about, deliberated, and planned for this very moment for weeks.

It takes the security guards another three minutes to reach her, and when they do all she does is offer both hands out for them to cuff and say:

“You _found_ me.”

Root doesn’t even try fighting against the widening smile on her face.

 

[…] 

 

Before her death her mother had always encouraged Root to follow her talents so that’s exactly what she does. She consistently tops the classes she enjoys, her teachers noticing and applauding her quick grasping of various Earth Skills with awe. Her natural aptitude for programming and technology is especially impressive and manages to get the attention of some officers of the Council, and before she even hits seventeen she is given the option of challenging an exam early to snag herself the title of junior programmer and technician.

She passes, of course.

Even when she was younger she had known she was gifted—brilliant, even, despite all the whispered variations of _weird kid_ that she recalls today with only a vague, dull pang of regret. Root might not have been the easiest to approach, but she hadn’t minded the exclusion too much when she at least had her own intelligence to rely on, and she cared even less as soon as Hanna came into the picture.

They met as children and Hanna had surprisingly taken to her right away. Normal and spirited, she had looked out for Root when she had no reason to, developed a friendship with her when everyone else had looked the other way and because of that, it seemed inevitable that Root would find herself gravitating toward her. Hanna would marvel over her intellect and Root remembers a time when she thought that having any of it was almost pointless in the face of the warm feeling of acceptance and inclusion that Hanna could inspire in people like her.

It doesn’t last, though. Hanna always had a curious mind and an appetite for stories of fantasy and romance rivalling Root’s thirst for knowledge and this is what gets her killed, in the end. Root is sixteen when it happens; the Council officially calls it theft and Root calls it absolute bullshit because how could someone as kind and open as Hanna ever be compared to the other criminals? To the murderers, crooks, and liars?

The truth is that Hanna was floated over a dumb technicality, failed by a system that wasn’t willing to spend any time or energy on the _little people_ , whatever that was. The same group of people that had seen potential and worth in Root had looked at Hanna—the only one other than her mother who had ever bothered with Root for _herself_ and not for what she could do—and seen something entirely different from what she actually was.

Hanna Frey. A disposable capital criminal at eighteen years and a _month_ for the theft of a damn _book_. It’s injustice and it’s disgusting, and Root would rather float herself than spend the rest of her days helping the very same people who allowed—and continue to allow—this to happen to people like Hanna.

She hates it, hates the unforgiving rules that caused her death and govern the Ark so mercilessly, hates the truth that she’s bound by them, too, has to play by them for as long as she’s on the ship. The only comfort she can find is in the fact that with her mother and Hanna both gone Root figures there is nothing left keeping her _here_ , attached to the Ark itself and the people in it.

There is little else for Root to do over the months and years other than develop her skills. She absorbs information and advice alike from her superiors as if she were parched for it and in her spare time she teaches herself advanced coding. It’s small things at first. She begins with private little side projects that are more trial-and-error than they are successes, but she builds upon her failures and the projects that she does manage to complete are nothing short of amazing. She learns to hack, eventually, and when that moment of mastery comes she feels like this is what her life has always been leading up to.

Sinclair calls on her one day telling her that she’ll be working on a new project in the Earth Monitoring Station. He asks her for help with programming their systems to be in-sync with wristbands that track and monitor vitals, and it’s then that something clicks in her mind. It doesn’t take long after that for Root to hack her way into the Council’s databases and find files on a project called _The 100_.

_The 100_. One hundred juvenile offenders to be sent down back to _Earth_ to test its survivability for the first time since the nuclear war, all because the Ark’s viability as a home for almost three thousand lives was fast proving to be unsustainable.

She is a month shy away from turning eighteen.

Root weighs her options, mulls over the chances of possibly dying on a planet long thought to be uninhabitable versus dying on an aging space station, running out of oxygen with the people who executed the only friend she ever had and people she feels absolutely no attachment to.

There has to be something more than _this_ , she thinks, and what she bases her decision on is a leap of faith she never thought she was capable of.

 

[…]

 

They bring her to the dropship, chained, cuffed, and with a stun rod conveniently prodding at her lower back. Which is kind of unnecessary, what with there being about five other guards in Kevlar armed with guns surrounding her. Root can’t tell if they’re treating her like she’s a prisoner or a dead woman walking to her own execution, but given what she knows about the situation she figures that the two probably aren’t that far off from each other.

Councilwoman Griffin is there to greet her, standing tall with sympathetic eyes as if she were sorry and as if she didn’t have a hand in any of this. It’s hypocritical of the other woman but Root doesn’t really care. She doesn’t see the point of the apologies and goodbyes sure to follow in a speech because fact of the matter is that Root found her own way out and is leaving of her own will, on her own terms and nobody else’s.

She gets told about Earth, about why she’s being moved from juvenile lockup. They tell her that she’ll be sent down with other kids, tell her that they number a hundred in total, and they also tell her nothing that she doesn’t already know.

Her wrists get uncuffed but she only has a second to enjoy it before they attach a familiar looking metal band on her right wrist. Needles dig into her skin uncomfortably when the band locks closed and when they do Root can’t help but arch an eyebrow and poke the beast.

“Better hope I programmed those things correctly,” she says with faked mirth.

“You’re a smart girl, Samantha—”

She stiffens, her face falling. “My name is Root.”

 “—Root,” Councilwoman Griffin corrects, and Root kind of regrets that she didn’t have enough time to change her official name on the Ark system herself. “Sinclair speaks highly of you and I don’t doubt his eye for talent.”

Root shrugs at the compliment, doesn’t say anything else. She knows how this works, has seen it firsthand with Hanna. She may be good, probably the best in her age group for what she does, but she’s still just a junior and she’s still officially a criminal so there will be no mercy for her to be found here.

That’s fine. They’ve gotten their use out of her and she’s gotten her use out of them.

The Councilwoman studies her for a second. She looks like she wants to add something else—God help her if she says _may we meet again_ —but she just nods her head, motioning her approval for the guards to finally take Root inside the dropship.

“Good luck,” is all she offers in the end, and Root breathes out a sigh of relief.

 

[…] 

 

That the Exodus ship is full to capacity is the first thing she notices as soon as she’s securely strapped to her seat.

The second thing is that people around her age take up the bulk of the crowd. That part is less than unsurprising, though there are also a few kids she can spot that she’s fairly certain can’t be much older than eight, too. As far as she can tell some of the delinquents are unconscious, and Root figures that as a likely result from being forcibly made that way after attempts to struggle against the guardsmen moving them out from their cells.

She doesn’t know most of the hundred but some of the faces she does happen to recognize take her by surprise. Standing in the corner strapped against the far wall is someone she recognizes from some of her Earth Skills classes, who she mostly only distinguishes apart from the others because she recalls him getting top scores in Engineering. The other part of it is that Root also quite clearly remembers him essentially being glued to the side of…the other guy wearing goggles who’s currently buckled down next to him, and, well. She supposes it’s nice that for some people things really don’t change.

Councilwoman Griffin’s daughter is here, too. For conspiracy to commit treason alongside her father.

With the severity of her crime Root doesn’t doubt for a second that Clarke Griffin would have been floated, just like her father, after her re-evaluation at eighteen. Which leads Root to wonder exactly how much that fact contributed to the reason why this whole death-excursion to Earth was ever approved of in the first place.

Her mind drifts back to her earlier run-in with Councilwoman Griffin, to the woman’s concerned yet apologetic look, to everything else Root knows about the story behind both her and Jake Griffin, and she decides then that without even knowing it, Clarke swayed an entire seat on the Council over to her favour.

Then there’s Wells Jaha, and Root doesn’t have much to say about _that_ other than she’s glad the Chancellor at least had the sense and decency to refuse to bend the rules for his own son.

 

[…] 

 

Even before the ship launches away from the Ark Root knows that trouble’s about to start. The kids are growing restless and a few notably unruly ones go ahead and unfasten themselves from their seats, too jittery to remain still and unable to resist the taste of Zero-G without being floated into space. It’s dumb but Root says nothing and keeps to herself. If these people want to get themselves killed on re-entry because they were too stupid to keep themselves strapped down then that’s their problem, not hers.

Turns out that she doesn’t need to bother anyway because Clarke Griffin does what Root doesn’t care enough to do herself and steps in with a few choice words. Her warnings prove to be about as effective as she thought they’d be—which is to say, not at all—but points to Clarke for trying and for not being completely clueless.

Monitors in the dropship choose that exact moment to come to life, and Chancellor Jaha’s profile flickers in and out of static, addressing the hundred.

_Prisoners of the Ark, hear me now…_

The jeers that follow are absolutely raucous. Most are directed at the screens though some of the kids are more content with calling Wells out and aiming their aggression there. Between the dropship’s incessant rattling and the other kids’ yelling, Root is finding it harder and harder to focus on Jaha’s announcement.

_…your crimes will be forgiven, your records wiped clean…_

She scoffs. A pardon might be possible for some of them, but anyone who actually believes that the Chancellor would let all one hundred go is a fool. The man has countless of secrets under his belt and she’s sure that _The 100_ won’t be the last.

He speaks about the drop site, about a military base called Mount Weather and supplies to last them years until the rest of the Ark can follow suit, and Root tries to keep her head clear and in task amongst all the noise.

_…your one responsibility is to stay alive._

 

[…] 

 

Re-entry and landing gets ugly and they lose two people before they even hit the ground. Root thinks they’re lucky they don't lose more given the fact that their ride to Earth is being held together by materials nearly a century old.

She lurches forward dangerously in her seat in time with the ship’s violent shaking, and when the lights start spluttering and the displays spark then go completely dead, she knows that something has gone very, very wrong. If the monitoring hardware they installed were damaged in any way...

A thunderous bang resounds followed by the sound of something (multiple somethings, actually) falling apart, and it just clicks in her head that there is a very real chance of her dying not on Earth as she had thought, but instead in the expanse between Earth and outer space—torn and blown apart in an old rickety dropship.

Maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all. 

She doesn’t get the chance to dwell on those thoughts for too long, though, because moments later the feeling of freefalling churning in the pit of her gut grinds down to something more manageable and soon it even stops altogether.

Everything stops; the lights stabilize and everything goes quiet, the tempered sound of engines humming nowhere to be found, nowhere to be heard.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so sorry for the wait. the week kind of got away from me and i meant to finish this before sunday but...yeah. apologies!
> 
> once again, thank you to twit for doing fact checking and beta work. much appreciated, twitsicle. more notes at the end.

As soon as it becomes evident that they’ve landed (crashed?) without any more hitches, the hundred nearly all but leap out of their seats at once and a commotion starts just in front of the ship’s exit. Root waits until she thinks she’s safe from being trampled by delinquents before unbuckling herself, making her way to the buzzing group of kids who are now barely being held back by a lone tall and dark-haired boy hovering possessively over the door controls.

“Back off—back off!” he orders, shoving people away as they try to scramble for the button. The rest of the crowd catches them as they get pushed and their response to the boy’s policing as they regain their footing is unmistakable rage. A few of them try to fight back again, but the boy has managed to sway some people over to his side and he’s taller and stronger and it’s all to no avail. 

It looks entirely too much like a riot about to go to hell so Root steps away, not wanting to be a part of any of it. 

Then, a female voice coming from the side of the throng of people: “ _Stop_!”

She spares a glance to where the voice comes from, the sight of blonde curls determinedly making its way through the crowd telling Root all she needs to know about who it is. “The air could be toxic,” Clarke Griffin protests, and it’s one of two things she’s heard all day said with any kind of logic or reasoning behind it that she can actually follow.

The boy shakes his head, holding his place. “If the air is toxic, we’re all dead anyway.”

Well that much is true, though it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t have other ways of testing the air outside.

Root walks over to the screens and terminals which turn out to be dead and unresponsive when she tries to boot them up. She sighs and racks her brain for anything else she could possibly use, or even make, on the fly. They might have lost whatever the Ark had programmed in the dropship to help them, but there had to have been at least _something_ that wasn’t burnt out or damaged on re-entry, and if she could just get her hands on even just one small thing that works, then maybe—

The ship vibrates with a low thrum and Root turns, eyes squinted, toward the exit. The door ramp opens, hissing and creaking as it lowers slow and looming like castle drawbridges she’s only ever read about in older Earth books. It descends and descends, letting unfiltered sunlight seep steadily into the skin of the Ark’s children for the first time in four generations and they breathe in the warmth, intimate akin to a _welcome home_ as none of them burn.

 

[…]

 

She finds out that the boy at the door’s name is Bellamy Blake, finds out that he has a sister who’s also part of the hundred, and this gets her attention. 

Having a second child on the Ark is a crime and Root has never entertained the thought of ever having a sibling, much less what the experience would even look like. But now she’s watching, wondering as Bellamy holds the crowd back to make way for a lone girl—for Octavia Blake—and now Root is watching as emotions cloud and tide over Bellamy’s face while this one girl with his blood running through her becomes the first of the Arkers to set foot on Earth in 97 years.

She thinks she sees pride and she thinks she can see love, although she doesn’t know how accurately she can identify either of those because pride is something Root has only ever felt about herself (there were smidgens, maybe, for Hanna from what feels like a long time ago) and as for love, well. Well, that’s something else entirely.

(The first of them is Octavia Blake. _This_ is what Bellamy wants her to be remembered for. Not Octavia Blake, the girl who was forced to live in hiding under the floorboards of the Ark for the crime of being born as his younger sister.)

Root lets herself wonder for a second before she tells herself that it’s irrelevant in the end and will never apply to her.

 

[…]

  

She’s the last of them to get off the dropship and when she does it’s with a tentative step.

Still, the feeling of soft, wet soil beneath her feet throws her off enough so that she has to actually reach out to balance herself on the ship’s side. The sensations are…new, and Root isn’t sure that she prefers the feeling of her feet sinking slowly into the ground over the solid metal plating on the Ark, but she supposes that’s just going to be something else she has to get used to now. 

She pushes herself off the ship and stands on her own two feet, swaying as she puts one foot in front of the other on uneven ground again, again, and again.

Funny how it’s like learning to stand and walk all over again.

 

[…]

 

Earth is different. It’s warm and bright, open with vibrant colours so varied, so dissimilar from the cool monochromatic hues of blue and grey lining the closed-off walls of Ark Station. There are more shades of red, yellow, green than she can name and it makes her eyes hurt, a little bit, too unaccustomed to the extra stimuli that become almost borderline overwhelming the more she thinks about it. But she knows that the sensitivity will pass in time, eventually. At least, she hopes.

It smells different, too. Like the turning pages of a book, or like a more diluted version of the tang of herbs and spices from Agro station. She hasn’t felt quite this enraptured by her senses since…ever, and the feeling isn’t exactly unwelcome, though it does prove to be somewhat distracting especially when there’s still the matter of figuring out where they even are.

If only going by the fact that she’s fairly certain the ship’s navigating and positioning systems were fried during re-entry, Root can’t be sure they’ve landed anywhere near they were meant to. The dropship was supposed to land on Mount Weather, but from what she can tell they’re in the middle of a rainforest with no trace of a military base to be seen.

She sighs, debating with herself whether or not to go back inside the ship to look for a physical map of Earth. Not that she would even know how to begin extrapolating where they are and where they’d need to go. Short of walking for miles in a single direction Root honestly has absolutely no idea how to start getting anywhere. She’s a programmer, not a navigator; give her a GPS (hell, ask her to _program_ a GPS) and, yeah, she can work miracles, but a map? Ugh. No, thank you.

And everyone else around her is too busy celebrating touchdown to really think about the position they’re in. Great.

Shaking her head, Root decides to go back to the ship anyway. She can figure how to sort out the whole map orienteering thing later. Maybe she can even sucker someone else more qualified into doing it for her. That would be ideal. Because Earth geography really isn’t her forte, she thinks as she almost loses her footing on the unfamiliar terrain yet again.

On the way back she notices a small group gathering just to the side of the dropship, huddled close together over a spread out piece of paper. She approaches the group carefully, trying not to draw too much attention to herself while she tries to get a closer look at what, precisely, they’re all looking at. Then she blinks when she sees it.

Apparently Clarke had the exact same thoughts as her because she actually beats Root to the map before she can even really start looking. She does it with an audience, too, and it surprises her how Clarke actually managed to get a (tiny) handful of people to _care_ about all this when two minutes ago all everyone was concerned about was causing a ruckus and partying on a not-so-toxic planet.

Root is a little impressed when the girl draws out their position relative to Mount Weather. She’s less impressed when Clarke informs them they’ve landed on the wrong mountain, and then even _less_ enthused when she describes exactly how far away they’ve been dropped off.

Mount Weather is miles away on foot, and Clarke kindly reminds them that there’s a radiation-soaked forest between them and their destination.

“Hey, cool, a map,” a voice pipes from next to Root all of a sudden. It’s Monty’s friend from the dropship. The one with the goggles. “They got a bar in this town? I’ll buy you a beer.”

She only gets half a second to twist around and really react to the unwanted advance before Wells steps in and grabs the boy by the arm to drag him away. “You mind?” he asks, voice not totally friendly.

“Hey—whoa!”

“Hey, hey! Hands off him, he’s with us,” another boy calls, and this time when she turns it’s a pale teen that she doesn’t recognize at all.

And _this_ boy has a posse of other guys following behind him, advancing on Clarke and her group threateningly.

Root frowns. She doesn’t want to presume but she _does_ have a survival instinct and it’s telling her that these new guys actually look like they were apprehended for things much more criminal than hacking and petty theft.

They’re picking up quite the audience.

“Relax,” Wells backs off, hands up in placation as he realizes the situation has already turned on its head for the worse in under five seconds. “We’re just trying to figure out where we are.”

“We’re on the ground. That not good enough for you?” Bellamy’s voice challenges from somewhere else away from both parties.

“We need to get to Mount Weather. Did you not hear my father’s message?” Wells says, and Root has to fight against the urge to sink her head into her hands because mentioning the Chancellor is absolutely the worst thing he could have possibly done if he wanted anyone to listen.

Unsurprisingly, Wells gets blown off and it’s Octavia who speaks up next: “What, you think you’re in charge here?” Then, she motions to Clarke derisively. “You and your little _princess_?”

It’s then that Clarke enters the conversation, having been completely silent since this whole argument started between some already-forming cliques of the hundred. She bypasses defending herself, choosing to ignore Octavia’s jab in favour of trying to convince everyone else that _not_ going to Mount Weather will most definitely screw them all over.

Honestly, Root finds Clarke’s attempts at reasoning quite admirable. Except, it doesn’t matter how convincing or logical she might be because there’s really no way to convince a group as worked up as this with rousing speeches, and all hope of accomplishing anything close to resembling _reason_ is shot down to shreds when Bellamy suggests that _they_ (Clarke and Wells, the entitled, the elite) should leave to find Mount Weather for all one hundred instead. 

A cheer of agreement reverberates through the forest, and it’s then that Root takes a look around and notices that nearly all of the hundred have stopped what they were doing to finally take an interest in this conversation. Wells, evidently, won’t take no for an answer.

“You’re not listening. We all need to go—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence before he’s suddenly pushed to the ground by the boy running with a posse. “Look at this, everyone. Chancellor of the Earth.”

Wells stumbles back to his feet, furious and barely holding it in while he silently dares the other guy to try it again.

He accepts the challenge, shoves Wells onto the dirt a second time. And it’s that decisive act that spurs Wells to abandon all pretense of calm in order to launch his entire body at the other teen with a cry.

They go at it, their fists flying at each other’s gut and face. Most go wide but some blows actually manage to land and those that do make Root wince as both boys end up scrapping it out on the ground.

It all goes downhill from there. There are people who are obviously itching to break the fight up but they’re being held back by Bellamy as well as the other boy’s group of followers. Root really wishes they wouldn’t do that because she _really_ did not sign up for being privy to squabbles in the form of crude wrestling matches with teenage criminals when all she wanted to do was to look for a stupid map.

 

[…]

 

With Clarke having pretty much sorted out where they are and where they’re going (though probably not in the way she wanted to resolve things, she thinks wryly), Root no longer has anything more to add to either fronts. So she leaves the scene before the fight is over, choosing to scrounge the cargo bay and upper levels of the dropship for anything of worth that she might be able to use somewhere down the line. 

The work gives her something to focus on, makes her feel useful, and though that’s a feeling she’s more than familiar with she also can’t help but be grateful especially since she hasn’t felt totally on-point ever since landing on Earth. Being productive has always kind of been her preferred way to pass the time but it only takes less than a few hours for her to realize that Earth makes her…not that. And the notion of inefficiency needles at her.

She bends down to pick up yet another fallen panel from a nearby terminal, sighing to herself when it turns out to be just as damaged as the ones she collected earlier. Her plan had been to try and set up a rudimentary radio broadcast to try and contact—well, she doesn’t know who she’d be able to reach, but at least she’d be doing _something_ and at least they’d have something out there instead of nothing but a bunch of kids fighting over who’s in charge. Or something else equally ridiculous.

Sadly, that plan obviously isn’t going so well. Apparently everything on the ship is busted one way or another and though she knows that they could probably use at least some components of whatever damaged hardware there is lying around, she also isn’t a mechanic. Nor an engineer for that matter.

She drops the panel on a nearby seat, running a hand through her curls bitterly as she slumps back against the ship’s wall onto the floor. For someone of her age with her skillset, Root had been almost invaluable on the Ark. But here on Earth…

Here, her expertise is only marginally useful by itself, and she’s quickly coming to resent the fact that she can’t do much alone.

“Hey.”

And clearly she’s also quickly learning how to pick out Clarke Griffin’s voice.

“Hi there.” Root tries to go for disarmingly sweet but she’s tired and frustrated—and maybe she doesn’t find Clarke nearly as useless as the rest of the hundred but she also doesn’t really know what the other girl could possibly want with her right now.

“I saw you outside earlier. Looking over, I mean.”

“Hm, what can I say? I’m curious, and you were getting all the attention.”

Clarke looks mildly uncomfortable at that, apparently not at all interested in leading a bunch of children. Root smirks (and as she does she kind of wonders how she’s coming across to the other girl. Crazy, maybe. Probably weird, but that’s not anything new either). Too bad. The girl isn’t going to get much of a choice at this rate.

“No, even before that—” she hesitates, shaking her head before steering the topic in a different direction and trying again. “…Samantha, right? I remember—”

Root sighs; this isn’t exactly the kind of conversation she wants to have a hundred times over. “It’s Root, now.”

“Oh. Right,” Clarke draws her brows together, obviously confused, but continues on anyway. “Anyway. I saw you earlier and thought I’d ask if you wanted to come with to Mount Weather."

She considers it for a second. “You know how to get there?”

“Finn’s a tracker.”

Finn, who?

“…the spacewalker?” Clarke offers.

 _Oh_. That guy. The guy who had unbuckled his seatbelt first while two others had followed suit and died as a result. Root is sure she makes a dubious face because Clarke doubles back and tries again: “Look, we need all the help we can get. Right now it’s just me and four others, and Finn says he can track, so...”

Root shakes her head. She might be curious about Earth but there’s no way she’s going to let that get the better of her and there’s no way she’s going to put her safety in the hands of people she’s met for all of a few hours—especially not when their so-called “navigator” already cost them the lives of two people thanks to his sheer stupidity. “No offense, but I think I’ll pass,” she says. Politely. Kind of. “Besides, I’d be more useful in here than out there.”

“Sure. No, I get it.” Clarke nods understandingly, though Root thinks she looks a little disappointed at her answer. She must be desperate if she’s coming to her for help. “Thought I’d ask anyway.” Clarke steps inside the cargo bay, looking around and inspecting the place before settling on picking up the panel next to Root. “…what were you doing in here?”

“Trying to figure out what we have that’s salvageable.” She gestures to a nearby desk, on top of which is a pile of various units that Root managed to scavenge. Which are all damaged, but might still be usable. Somehow. “It’s all a mess; everything’s totalled, but with the right hands I think we could broadcast a signal.”

“You can do that?”

Damn it. “Well, no,” The admission irritates her but she keeps her tone light. “I know how it works. Theoretically, I mean. But I don’t know how to build it myself.”

“Well that’s something, at least.” Clarke breathes out a sigh of relief. “It’s good to know we have someone back here doing actual work. And I’m sure someone will turn up who can help.”

Right. Root doubts it, and she says as much. “I’d rather find them myself. If I wait around for them to come to their senses it’ll be years before anything gets done.”

“You’re probably right about that,” the other girl agrees. She offers the dead panel back to Root with a smile. “Anyway. I should head out before it gets dark.”

“Sure.”

“We’ll be back with the food and supplies.”

“All right,” she says back. Root has no idea how Clarke thinks four people are going to manage to carry food to feed all hundred of them, but sure. Whatever Clarke says.

Once the blonde is gone, Root tosses the panel on top of the growing mountain of ship and computer parts. It lands, joining the rest of its kind with a clang.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a couple of things that i'll clarify if this isn't obvious already:
> 
> 1.) shaw won't show up until later. (although I've actually pushed up when she'll appear just because i thought about it and was worried i'd lose readers if i kept you guys waiting too long. i DID label this story root/shaw, after all) (but also, i can't wait to write shaw tbh)  
> 2.) the story will (mostly) follow the 100's plot. pretty much the same things will happen, but slightly different ofc with root being around


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry (again) for the wait. I didn't write for a week so that's why this is super late. I only blame myself.
> 
> Once again a giant thank you to twit for fact-checking (ugh) and beta-work. She's read and re-read this probably almost as much as I have and she hasn't said that she's completely hated it yet, so yay. Can't do this without you, twitsicles.
> 
> (also, I went back and fixed some spacing stuff with the previous two chapters. because someone called me out on my bad formatting. and this someone is someone that i dare not displease. cough.) (love you facey.)

It’s Wells who happens to make his way back inside the ship next, managing to limp his way in while heavily favouring his right leg and sporting quite an impressive bruise just under his eye. He comes alone, probably to get away (or, more likely, hide) from his earlier spectators, and the guy looks so wrecked from his little scrap that he doesn’t even notice that Root’s already occupied the cargo bay before him.

“Maybe next time,” she begins, looking up from her worktable and smirking wryly to herself when Wells starts in surprise. “don’t mention your father to a group full of kids who’ve been screwed by him, huh?”

Wells stares at her for a moment, and Root thinks there might be a moment of recognition from his end before he shakes his head and looks away. “There are more important things to worry about than what my father did or didn’t do on the Ark.”

“Probably. But never let it be said that a hundred teenage criminals can be expected to think with their heads.”

He spares her a glance, shifting from his spot on the floor and wincing as he does so. “You seem to do it just fine, seeing how you’re in here.”

“It’s not very hard out-thinking a group like this.”

“Why can’t they be more like you,” he sighs. Root raises an eyebrow. Wells never really stood out to her apart from his relationship with the Chancellor and before any of this they’d only talked when absolutely necessary so it’s a bit of a surprise that he remembers anything about her. “Reasonable,” Wells clarifies. “You’re here so you got screwed by dad just as badly as everyone else did. But here you are. Doing what needs doing, like you always did even back on the Ark.”

Well, he isn’t wrong, but...

“Oh, Wells,” she says with a smile, all sweet and condescending in her confidence and self-assurance. It’s almost touching that Wells sees only the best in her, that he can’t see that having more people be ‘like her’ is the last thing he should want. “You don’t know me very well. I’m not here because of anyone’s choice but mine.”

 

[…]

 

It takes her a while to finally _get_ it, but when the idea hits her Root almost smacks herself for taking so long to get there.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been at it, staring and prodding at fried panels and transformers, racking her brain for ways they could possibly dismantle and reassemble the parts she’d collected into a radio, but it comes to her when Wells starts getting restless:

He’s laid down on the floor, constantly moving and rearranging himself in an attempt to get into a comfortable position without worsening his injuries when Root looks up just as he fiddles and tugs at his wristband.

Giving up, he huffs in irritation and settles, and at the sight of it Root forgets about telling him to move somewhere else entirely.

She looks down at her own wristband. The thick screen on it is blank save for its steady blue glow, but the light is the only indicator Root needs to be sure the band is working properly, transmitting her vitals to the Ark with every beat.

The wristband is crucial and they can do something with it, Root knows that much. Her involvement with making it was mostly restricted to programming and designing its interface on the Ark systems, but she’s also somewhat familiar with some of its physical components. She doesn’t need to be a genius to know that the band needs electrodes to monitor their vitals (as if she could forget when they’ve been digging _into_ her wrist since leaving the station). She also knows that it would need something else to convert those signals into a frequency that’s attuned to the Ark.

And therein lies Root’s one gripe about the whole thing.

She doesn’t love the idea of communicating with Ark station so soon after basically volunteering herself to be sent down to Earth, so the idea of contacting Sinclair and the Chancellor is one that’s a last resort. The wristbands being the only thing they have in the way of a reliable means of contact with anyone ties her hands though, and if that’s the case she doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. Regardless, all she’d need to do is manipulate the signals and they could reach the Ark directly.

It’s…not an impossible thing to do. Even if she has to swallow her pride and ask for help from the very people she thought she’d left behind and finally escaped having to do anything with. Figures.

God. She almost can’t believe that the Chancellor actually expected them to scope Earth out with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

But at least now there’s a plan. A very vague, maybe kind of flimsy plan that could go wrong in any number of ways, but it’s a plan nonetheless and whatever direction they decide to head in is as good as any from where they’re all standing now.

“Wells,” she calls out, still musing silently to herself as she continues studying the band.

“Yeah?”

“How much do you like the thought of keeping these a tad longer?”

“What are you talking about?”

She hums under her breath, taps the metal thoughtfully. “I think we can use these to contact Earth Monitoring Station.”

Whatever Wells was about to reply with is cut pre-emptively when they hear loud cheers and whoops coming from outside. Root turns toward the noise just in time to see Wells already struggling to push himself upright from the floor to head out.

“You hear that?”

“Don’t think anyone could have missed it.”

He groans, and Root smiles in amusement as Wells stops trying to hide his obvious irritation with the group. “What are they doing _now_?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

She follows him out of the ship, only just noticing how long she’s been inside working when she steps out to find that the sun has almost completely set. She must have been at it for a good few hours at least, and, by some kind of miracle, while she was inside the rest of the hundred had actually managed to get some of their heads together to set up some logs for seats. They’d even started a campfire in the middle of the crash site, and Root would be lying if she said she weren’t just a little surprised. And maybe even a little impressed.

But of course, someone inevitably has to ruin the moment and it doesn’t take very long for exactly that to happen; the hundred are crowded around the fire and despite being as hyperactive and overexcited as ever, even Root doesn’t think that a simple fire could hold their attention for this long. No, something else is definitely up, and there are far too many bodies blocking the way for even Root’s above average height to give her an advantage in getting a glimpse of what all the commotion is about.

Wells keeps pushing on ahead in front of her, moving bodies out of the way and Root decides to trail closely after the path of people he manages to brush off to the side.

The sight that greets them once they’re in the clear is one of a girl’s wristband being yanked off with a crowbar and being thrown into the fire. Root freezes as soon as she sees it. She isn’t sure if she’s more stunned at how they managed to get the bands off at all or at how completely idiotic the whole idea behind their disabling and removal is, but thankfully Wells saves her the trouble of deciding by yelling out exactly what her thoughts boil down to:

“What the _hell_ are you doing?”

“We’re liberating ourselves,” comes the answer, and unsurprisingly it’s Bellamy who’s already there in the middle of the camp, the boy from earlier who Wells got into a fight with standing next to him with a gross sneer. Great. “What does it look like?”

“It _looks_ like you’re trying to get us all killed!” He shoots back, resolutely advancing on Bellamy even as he limps. “The communication systems are dead and these wristbands are all we’ve got.”

“Says who?” The boy next to Bellamy demands, and it’s such a waste of time because does it really _matter_ who said it?

“Says _her_!” Wells shouts back, pointing insistently at Root with a finger.

Wait. What. She blinks, jerks to attention immediately.

“If you won’t listen to me, then at least listen to her.” His voice is pleading to the group now, and Root freezes for the second time in as many minutes that day when she feels way too many eyes turning their attention to her.

Oh, _fuck_.

 

[…]

 

Maybe she should give Wells credit that he’s due for, because this? This was _well played_ on his part, even if there can be no doubt that Root is absolutely going to _kill him_ for it after everything’s said and done. 

Belatedly, Root realizes that she should probably be feeling dread right about now. Except she doesn’t. She can’t feel dread and she isn’t even angry. She’s just…stunned, really. Because Root never asked for an audience with any of these people and never has she expressed any notion of ever wanting one. (Because why go through all that when it was becoming increasingly obvious she could leave all that work to Clarke, right?) So how did she even get here? How did she walk right _into_ this one?

Bellamy asks the first obvious question. “And just who are you?”

“Root,” she answers, doesn’t offer anything more. Maybe she didn’t expect this going down the way that it is but like hell she’s going to fall for being intimidated by a teenage boy in the beginnings of a power trip. She’s not an amateur.

The boy from earlier scoffs. “What kind of name is that?”

She raises a brow and casually says, “A long story that won’t make sense to anyone here.”

He makes for a threatening step toward her, only stopping in his tracks when Bellamy calls out his name. “Murphy _._ Let her talk.” He orders, as if he actually thinks that Root needs anyone’s permission to speak. “…well? What’s Wells talking about?”

She spares Wells a glance and he has the audacity to nod for her to go ahead. Ass. “The wristbands give us a direct line to Earth Monitoring Station. If we can get them off— _without_ disabling them and shoving them into a firepit,” she adds pointedly when Bellamy opens his mouth to protest. “then maybe we could try changing the signals to transmit a message; replace our vitals that it’s supposed to be tracking.”

“That’s a lot of ifs and maybes.”

 _I don’t see you coming up with anything_ is what she wants to say but bites back. “It’s something to think about.”

“Yeah. A ‘something to think about’ that might not work. And more importantly,” he continues, this time turning away from her to address the rest of the group to ask, “You really want to ask the people up there for help? When they’re the reason we’re here in the first place? When they’re the ones who sent us down here with nothing, expecting us to just lay down and die?”

Root wonders if anyone is going to tell this guy that laying down and dying is exactly what they’ll be doing if they don’t get help from somewhere. Probably not. “So what do you want to do?” She asks, because apparently she hates herself and is curious about how far Bellamy’s mental gymnastics can go. “You want to talk about surviving, right? So share with the class.”

“We don’t need the Ark to survive. We’re here and they’re not. You think that the people up there care about us? That the people who hoped we’d die here are going to be the same ones to save us?”

“They don’t need to care about us,” she argues, because it’s true: they don’t. They just need to care about themselves, which Root knows for a fact that they do otherwise none of this would be happening right now. “They need to know Earth is livable so they can come down here, and guess what? They’re not going to do that if they think we’re all dying because you’re all manhandling your bands with crowbars.” _Like savages_ , she’s tempted to add.

“And then? They get here and then, what, we steal their supplies? Get locked up again?” Bellamy shakes his head. “No. We can take care of ourselves.”

The urge to shake him until he understands rises, and Root doesn’t normally have a temper—especially not when she has an audience—but right now she can feel her patience waning because _how_ are they going to take care of themselves? And with what?

“I don’t care what you say,” Wells steps in, finally taking part in this conversation that he had practically shoved at her. “We can’t survive here on our own. And those are our people up there, they at least have the right to know about Earth.”

“Those are not my people. Those people locked my people up. Your _father_ locked my sister up for being born, so no. Now, my people are the ones that are here, with me, on the ground.”

Wells deflates visibly. “He was just following the law.”

“Your father doesn’t enforce the law anymore. Not here. And like I said—we can take care of ourselves. _Can’t we?_ ” Bellamy asks loudly, rousing the hundred into fist-pumps and shouts of agreement and Root knows a lost cause when she sees one.

They continue on with their business, some returning to line up to get their bands removed while others, despite agreeing with Bellamy earlier, are still reluctant in severing their ties to the Ark. The latter is a small group and Root doesn’t know how long they’ll last against Bellamy in all his misplaced insistence wrapped up in tall, charismatic teenage boy. Eventually, the noise dies down, the crowd thinning out around camp as night comes and people begin settling into various areas of the crash site and back inside the ship to get sleep.

“You never answered my question,” Root points out once it’s just her and Bellamy left in the clearing, standing next to a fire struggling to stay alive. His expression is blank when he turns to her. “What do you want to do?”

It’s then that he breaks out into a smirk, the small upturn of his lip belaying his smugness at his victory of the night. “Whatever the hell we want.”

 

[…]

 

In hindsight, she probably should have known that not everyone would take to the idea of contacting the Ark. Or maybe she did know and she just didn’t care. (She still doesn’t.) 

It was a selfish plan, she knew that much from the start; she hates the idea of reaching out to Earth Monitoring as much as anyone else, but she’s also one of the few who happen to have the skills that would allow her to use the Arkers for her own advantage. The Chancellor and his council work within a very specific set of rules after all, and maybe once they land on Earth ( _if_ they land on Earth, she reminds herself) they’d finally bend _somewhere,_ but Root knows for a fact that every system has a flaw and she’s equally sure that she can exploit whatever they can throw out there.

She forgets because she doesn’t care that not everyone can say the same.

 

[…]

 

By the time Root wakes up the next morning it’s almost mid-day. Seconds, minutes, hours—time passes the same no matter where you are but day and night cycle differently when you’re somewhere in which the concept of “night” isn’t being standardized by timed announcements and dimming hallway lights. 

It’s a small thing but freedom is freedom and the knowledge of being able to run things on a schedule that _isn’t_ regulated by the Ark is exciting as much as it is liberating.

There’s such a thing as not enough regulation and too much liberation, though, and she sees as much as soon as she steps out to be greeted by Wells roughhousing it with Murphy. Again. They’re duking it out next to a pair of shoes and folded up jeans that some of the hundred are already eyeing and Root doesn’t need to ask to know what’s going down.

Well then. If by “whatever the hell we want” Bellamy really meant he wanted to make an utter holy mess of them all then he’s sure as hell getting what he asked for because after a sharp cry from Murphy there’s all of a sudden a weapon in play, and it’s Wells who has the other boy in a headlock with a jackknife to his throat.

“Wells!”

They all turn and it’s Clarke pushing through some bushes as she makes her way to them, returned just in time to see things gone to hell. She makes her way to Wells and immediately tells him to let Murphy go.

Another argument follows. She can make out that a scrap has started again but Root tunes it out because when she looks at Clarke the other thing she notices is that the girl is empty-handed. She frowns, quickly glancing over Clarke’s shoulder. She’d also left camp with four other people but now she returns only with three.

“Clarke…” Root starts carefully.

She doesn’t know how the other girl hears her between Wells and Murphy and Bellamy yelling to break the two away from each other, but she does.

“Where’s the food?”

And that’s the question that finally gets Murphy and Wells to drop whatever it is they’re fighting about because they’ve all been hungry for nearly a day and the answer to it is something they all have vested interest in.

Clarke’s face drops and Root steels herself for what she’s about to hear.

“We were attacked.”

 _Attacked?_ she echoes blankly in her head. “By what?”

“Not what,” Clarke answers, and Root is reeling because she just somehow _knows_ what she’s going to say next and she’s equal parts delighted and apprehensive at the thought of them not being alone. “ _Whom_.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "sorry for the wait." 
> 
> "thanks to twit."
> 
> \- my mantra
> 
> (bits and pieces of this are unbeta'ed. if it sucks that's why.)

Not what. Whom.

They were attacked by _grounders_ —the last of whom they all thought had died of old age on the Ark some generations ago—ended up with Monty’s other half very likely having been captured if not killed by one and the first thought that flits to Root’s mind is, kind of disturbingly, that she’s almost thankful for the turn of events.

It’s wrong and it occurs to her that her priorities might be a bit jumbled when she’s more curious about the grounders themselves than the fact that the only other inhabitants of Earth are people who don’t share Root’s curiosity for the new neighbours, or so to speak. People who are, apparently, more interested in either driving them away or killing them off entirely than approaching with open arms.

(Negotiation is probably out of the question given that their first move was a spear through Jasper’s chest. Damn.)

Which is understandable, she supposes. This is all new territory for her but it’s not like they’ve given any reason for the grounders to be anything other than hostile, and from their point of view, the hundred all just look like invaders falling from the sky. Though the open animosity does pose the problem of how they can keep going like this when there’s nowhere else to go, and they can’t exactly expect to fight off Earth natives when the hundred have been on the planet for a total of twenty-eight hours and can’t even feed themselves.

They are so, completely screwed.

Still. _Grounders_.

Against all good logic and everything she was taught on the Ark, Root thinks that maybe a part of her that she’d been steadily ignoring for years had hoped for _something_ when she made the decision to come to Earth. She’d been chasing after scraps of freedom and morsels of change then, hadn’t cared if she came out of that search dead or alive (Alive, preferably. Self-preservation is still very much in her wheelhouse, thank you very much.) as long as she was out of the Ark, but this is—it’s so much more than anything she expected.

It’s terrifying and exciting and, yeah, she’s at a disadvantage--off-kilter from their arrival and just now learning to swallow that everything she knows about Earth is a lie, but...

They aren’t alone, and despite everything else, that somehow feels more like a beginning than an end.

 

[…]

 

Clarke doesn’t downplay the grounders’ presence, exactly, but she does end up trying to get everyone to _stop for a second and listen_ because apparently besides the grounders there are also two-headed deer and giant, people-eating water snake things they should all be keeping on the lookout for. She’s heard of neither before but the latter seems particularly relevant to her continued life so she asks Clarke about it when they’re alone in the dropship.

She questions that decision almost immediately when she finds out that there’s an entire mundane story of how they got derailed from Mount Weather by Octavia wanting to go for a swim.

“Octavia knows how to swim?” Root asks dubiously, latching onto the one bit of interesting information about the whole thing.

The other girl makes a face as she grabs a bag off the floor. “Well, she was more…standing in the water.”

“Oh.” Well that’s disappointing.

Though it’s a little bit fitting because as it turns out, the ending to a story involving giant carnivorous snakes is only about half as exciting as she thought it’d be. Apparently they’d had to distract the thing with rocks to get its attention and Clarke says it was a close call but when Root looks over to where Octavia is, having an argument with Bellamy off to the side of the ship’s exit, there isn’t really anything outwardly wrong with the girl other than maybe some strands of hair drying into frizz.

“Really? Hm. I couldn’t tell,” she comments casually. “She looks more than fine to me.” There’s a smile she can’t keep off her face and an obvious lilt to her voice that definitely doesn’t go unnoticed by Clarke judging from the mildly uncomfortable furrow in her brow, and, oh she’d almost forgotten the small pleasures of throwing people for a loop.

“It was close,” Clarke says again, clearing her throat in a way that makes it obvious she doesn’t know what else to say. “Just be careful. It’s not just the people out to get us. It’s an entire planet now.”

“Always am.” Except for when she’s putting suicidal attempts to leave the Ark in motion, anyway. She follows Clarke to the ship’s exit, the sounds of people hustling around camp getting louder with every step. Root stops short just before her feet leave the metal ramp. “You’re really serious about going after Jasper, then?”

“He’s out there. We can’t just leave him.”

“You could, actually,” Root argues, and to hell with subtlety or tact because the more likely answer is that Jasper is a lost cause. “He could be dead already. Then you’d just be handing yourself over for nothing.”

“And if he’s not?”

“Same question. If he’s alive, then what’s the plan? We don’t exactly have anything to break him out with. We don’t even have anything to _trade_ with.”

Clarke shakes her head. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she says, and there’s a conviction behind the statement that confuses Root because she has no idea where it’s coming from or what she could be talking about.

“What are you—”

“You ready to go?” Wells interrupts, appearing at their side from out of nowhere. Clarke’s face falls, her reaction too instantaneous and violent to simply be irritation as she brushes past him coldly.

“You’re not coming.”

“My ankle’s fine.”

“It’s not your ankle, Wells,” She sighs out like it’s the tenth time she’s had to repeat this. “It’s you.”

Clarke marches across camp then, with Root and Wells following after her heel and normally she wouldn’t be here allowing herself to possibly be a witness to ex-drama (it’s not hard to put two and two together when Wells is so clearly desperate for Clarke’s attention while she pretends to ignore his existence), but Clarke has something up her sleeve and Root intends to know what it is.

Camp isn’t nearly as impressive or organized as it ought to be with so many of them living there, but oddly enough Bellamy’s tent is one of the things that stands out about it. Somehow, in between spending his time intimidating kids into removing their wristbands and recruiting other teens to join his army of idiots, he’d managed to build a decent-looking thing that actually passes for a tent, kind of.

She doesn’t like Bellamy, thinks that she likely never will, but there’s a sentiment to his productivity and follow-through that she can at least respect and identify with. Too bad for him, Clarke doesn’t seem to care for his theatrics because she just barges inside without so much as a warning.

The three of them find Bellamy inside, hunched over a cot in the corner and another body and, oh.

Clarke doesn’t even wait or miss a beat before she calls him out. Probably for the best. “Bellamy.”

There’s a low groan of annoyance from the girl on the bed with him that sends Root’s eyebrows up, and then an even lower _ugh_ before Wells excuses himself, leaving herself and Clarke to listen to rustling sheets as the other two in the room collect themselves and it isn’t really awkward, per se, but it is sending her mind to places. Places it hasn’t been in a while, but there’s a time and a place for everything and her self-control isn’t as bad as she sometimes makes it look to be.

“Nice to know you’ve got your priorities in order,” Root quips lightly as the girl grabs for a shirt and leaves the tent, dishevelled but otherwise unbothered by the sudden audience. Well, there’s more than one way to win people over to your side and Bellamy evidently has no problems using this particular one. Good for him to indulge while he’s at it.

“What do you want?”

“Wells tells me you have a gun.”

It’s a statement rather than an accusation that Root tries not to react to, but if Bellamy has a gun then that’s news to her and she doesn’t like feeling like she’s continuously a step behind anyone, not even Clarke.

(But a gun. Clarke’s plan on saving Jasper from an entire population of grounders is to go in with a single _gun_. She’s starting to think her initial assessment of Clarke being a more rational one may have been a bit hasty.)

He digs under the mattress of his cot, shows them only the butt of the firearm warily like he’s afraid if he reveals any more then they’d snatch it from his hands. A good instinct to have, since she’d definitely be tempted if she ever knew he wasn’t looking.

“Good,” Clarke nods. “Then you’re coming with me.”

Bellamy scoffs. “And what makes you think I’m gonna do that?”

“Because.” Clarke motions back to the camp with a wave and an unapologetic smile. “You want _them_ to follow you. And right now, they’re only thinking one of us is a coward.”

 

[…]

 

Root dismisses herself from Clarke’s company as soon as it becomes obvious she’s making the rounds in an attempt to recruit “volunteers” to look for Jasper. She doesn’t think that Clarke would ask her to go, but it doesn’t hurt to cover her bases. Plus, while the prospect of watching the other girl trick people into seeing things her way is amusing as hell, following people around aimlessly isn’t really her thing.

She finds herself back inside the dropship because there’s nowhere else to go if she wants any kind of privacy, and the nice thing about the upper level is that there’s a latch she can use to lock people out.

She pushes it open, fully expecting the place to be empty. Except, a voice from inside asks:

“Who’s there?”

“I should be asking you that,” she shoots back, frowning. She pushes her head farther in to get a better look. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim lighting inside, but eventually she finds Monty in the corner working away at a loose plating on the wall that Root had been trying to figure out how to get open earlier.

“Root?”

“That’s me.” Securing the latch behind her, she makes her way over to where he is and watches as he fiddles with what little progress she’d made. Upper body strength and electrical engineering are both more up his alley than hers and that’s probably the reason why he’s here in the first place. Or part of it anyway. She narrows her eyes.

He turns, smiles as if he’d been expecting her. “Clarke told me you’d be coming here.”

“And how’d she get you to leave her side?” The question gets Monty to look away sharply, and Root pushes to gain some ground in the conversation. “Aren’t you supposed to be out there looking for your co-conspirator?”

The metal barely gives way when he tugs at it with a frustrated grunt. “She said she needed me here.” He comes away with a sigh. “Grew up in farm station and recruited by engineering, you know.”

She didn’t, but she’s not surprised he was recruited. He’d always seemed capable from their time in class together. “Sure.”

“I should be out there. He’s my friend.”

“Maybe. But here you are instead.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on. Let’s get this out of the way.”

He goes silent, and it’s only by chance that when she reaches over to help tear the paneling out, she notices his knuckles turning white from his grip. He starts again. “Do you think he’s…do you think we can—”

And there’s the question she knows everyone’s been asking themselves. She’d been upfront with Clarke earlier but somehow it’s different now. She doesn’t know Monty very well but she knows enough to know that he isn’t a leader; he’s no Clarke Griffin who has no real personal history or attachment to Jasper, and that’s kind of the problem because, yeah, she’s pretty sure the guy is a goner. Dead is dead and if Root had her way they absolutely would be leaving Jasper behind. But telling Monty all of that seems…cruel to the point of counterproductive.

She wants to lay out the facts. She wants to lay out the facts because that’s always been her first instinct, but the facts are that the grounders have Jasper in a condition that’s worse than bad and all they have in the way of a plan is a single gun and the drive of a girl leading a handful of kids who never volunteered themselves for the mission.

She hesitates.

“Never mind,” he backtracks. “I shouldn’t have—“

“I don’t know,” Root blurts out before she can stop herself. She doesn’t know why she’s doing this. Comfort doesn’t come easy to her (or at all) but there’s something about the way Monty’s fatigue and fear translate into the hunch in his shoulders that spurs the words to come out, even if they’re awkward and crude and not at all what he wants to hear. “It doesn’t matter what I think. If he’s alive then he’s out there and if he’s not then it is what it is.”

“But what if—“

“Look, honestly? The best thing you can do right now is help me with this. Clarke’s already out there. If there’s something to be found then the least you can do is trust her willingness to find it.” She says, in what she hopes is a neutral answer. She doesn’t want to get his hopes up. In truth she’s a firm believer that there are very rarely any points for trying. Maybe Clarke won’t be able to find Jasper, but if there’s one thing Root can’t deny it’s that the girl has one hell of a stubborn streak for putting herself through all the trouble.

He shakes his head after a moment’s pause and the motion seems to do the trick for clearing his thoughts because the next thing he does is agree with her.

“Right. You’re right,” he repeats, if only for his own benefit. “She said the same thing.”

“To trust her?”

Monty nods his head. “Yeah. And like I said, she pretty much told me to stay put. That I’d be of more help on the ship.”

It’s hard to disagree when they’re on the same boat.

“Also,” he continues, “she mentioned that you had some ideas you needed help with. Said something about a plan with the wristbands?”

That confirms her earlier suspicions. Clarke might think she was being subtle but Root’s no slouch at being able to see where people have meddled before. Comes with the territory of being good at manipulating others herself.

Sighing dramatically, she says, “So she sent you here because she wants us to partner up, huh? I suppose I could be working with somebody worse.”

He scoffs, readjusting his grip on the metal beside her own hands. “You could be working with a _lot_ of people who are worse.”

Isn’t that the truth.

“You’re right,” she agrees. “So let’s get to it.”

 

[…]

 

What’s interesting is that despite how different they are in their personalities, in terms of their skills and ingenuity her and Monty are more similar than different. Sure they’ve got their own specialties but there are overlaps, however few, and they’re both bright enough to walk each other through the specifics that don’t.

He nods along fervently as she tells him about her ideas, and, while unnecessary, she appreciates it when he confirms that she was right, they can reach the Ark. They’d need time to sort out the details, but that’s to be expected. And between her and Monty they’re so much closer now to having something to work with.

Usually she prefers to work on her own, but as it turns out Monty’s company isn’t actually half-bad. It’s obvious he’s still upset over Jasper, but the distraction doesn’t seem to affect his work too much apart from making them both more prone to awkward silences. It doesn’t matter though because whatever he might be thinking or feeling isn’t her business as long as he keeps on task.  Which he does.

The only thing that could use more work is his conversational skills. Much to her own surprise Root develops an interest in making small talk. It’s short-lived but it was there and she only promptly loses it after he starts rambling about…something to do with electricity (She thinks? He’s been at it for so long she can’t be sure anymore). That’s about when she learns that while she gets her kicks from digital data, Monty gets his from talking about watts and voltages. Apparently. Different strokes.

It’s one of the weirdest partnerships she’s ever been in. By the end of it though,  Root thinks she might actually like to keep him around after they’re done.

They work well together. It shouldn’t surprise her but it does.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the short chapter. I promise things will pick up soon.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry.

Progress on the wristbands goes slower than expected.

It comes to a stop completely when they hit a snag, and Monty tries his best to work his fastest but their biggest problem is that none of the bands that Bellamy and his gang of misfits have collected are functioning, and without one there isn’t anything more they can do. As luck would have it, everything they have is irreparable too, and they all have impulsive children and brute force to thank for that.

Root would volunteer giving up her own for a test run if taking them off wasn’t exactly what Bellamy wanted the rest of the hundred to do. It’s a little petty (Monty even tells her as much) but, hey, people all have their flaws and while Root is usually above pettiness, she can also sometimes make exceptions. Besides, Bellamy’s only deluding himself and the entire camp if he thinks they can survive Earth without the people on the Ark.

No, they need at least one person with a working wristband. The rest of the hundred can do whatever they want, but one band means _maybe_ Ark Station comes back to the ground and Root will take those maybe odds over certain death. Which means the only way Bellamy is going to get his hands on Root’s is if he cuts her damn hand off himself.

Octavia, thankfully, comes along and ends up offering up hers instead. Root’s pretty sure she’s doing it to spite Bellamy, and when the girl confirms it with a shrug, Root has to remind herself not to burst out laughing. She tells Octavia to be her guest because Root _really_ isn’t about to stop Octavia from both giving them exactly what they need _and_ getting at her brother. The remark earns her Monty’s side-eye but the important thing is that he doesn’t refuse the offer.

The three of them manage to pry the band off with minimal physical damage, but high hopes in the room don’t even last five seconds before the lights on Octavia’s wristband fizzle out and die, bringing them back to square one.

 

[…] 

 

When Clarke and her company return, they do so with an injured Jasper in tow and nowhere to take care of him. Camp is starting to look like an actual livable place rather than a landmark crash site, but the problem is that Jasper _won’t shut up_ and tents, unfortunately, aren’t soundproof. They decide to stick him in the upper dropship level, and though Monty is more than pleased with the arrangement, Root is anything but.

Things escalate when Clarke leaves—again—to look for what she thinks to be seaweed with healing properties, when Octavia decides take it upon herself to make camp a living hell for everyone (thanks, Bellamy), and when Murphy finally loses it—Root’s surprised that took as long as it did—and actually threatens to kill Jasper himself for some peace and quiet.

It’s a damn mess, and though she’s locked away from him in the dropship with Monty and Jasper, she’s not sure that she feels all that much safer in there from Murphy’s yet-ineffectual death threats and pounding.

On top of all that, Jasper’s cries, screams, and convulsing through the entire night make it impossible for her to get any kind of rest or sleep. Root thinks for a second and decides that she also isn’t sure that she wouldn’t rather be outside secretly cheering on for Murphy’s success.

 

[…]

  

The good news is that Jasper recovers, slowly, thanks to Clarke and Finn returning with the seaweed (Root hadn’t thought that it would actually work, but it’s not as if she’s familiar with natural medicinal herbs like Clarke is with her Councilwoman/Doctor mother). The bad news is literally everything else.

Two of the hundred go missing one night and when they don’t return the next day, acid fog hits the camp. It takes them all by surprise but most of them manage to hide in the dropship until it passes, and then it becomes pretty obvious the reason why they should stop expecting the missing pair to come back. They lose Atom that same day to the fog, too.

Ninety-five of them left. 

[…] 

 

Root wakes up the next morning to shouting coming from outside. It isn’t the first time that it’s happened but it never really stops being annoying that teenagers can be loud enough that she can hear them bickering when she’s all the way locked up in second freaking floor of the dropship.

Shrugging on a jacket, she steps out and what she sees is basically the entire camp shoving Murphy along and angrily chanting out _Float him! Float him!_ and Root is _so_ confused because what in the ever fuck even happened while she was asleep for a few hours? She quickly pulls a girl with three braids away from the group and just barely avoids getting smacked in the face for it.

“Hey, watch it!” The girl hisses, her green eyes flaring as she tears her arm out of Root’s grasp. Root is pretty sure she knows her name but with all the commotion going on she can’t be bothered to scrounge her head for the right one.

She backs off. “What the hell is going on here?”

The girl stares at her for a long moment before answering. “Wells is dead. Murphy killed him.”

She stops, blinks at the news. _Dead?_ She hadn’t been expecting a goddamn death—not this early, anyway. And Wells’, too. It was obvious the second they landed on the ground that Murphy and almost everybody else on the ground had it in for him, but why now? “ _What?_ How the hell did that happen?”

“Don’t know. They found Murphy’s knife near the—the body,” she explains. “Now they want his head.”

Of course they do. Of course.

Shaking her head, Root joins in the march along with the girl (who she promptly loses in the crowd) and watches as Murphy is tied up and dragged through mud and dirt at a clearing away from camp. His clothes and face are filthy as he’s forced on a stool, yelling out that they can’t do this to him—that he didn’t do anything, but absolutely no one in camp believes it when the proof is in the knife and they’ve all seen the boy behave like a killer.

No one steps in when the noose is tied, tightened around his neck, and no one stops it when Bellamy kicks the stool out from under him.

(Clarke _tries_ , though. She tries, and it’s a lot more than what Root can say for everyone else and already more than what Murphy deserves as far as she’s concerned.)

Root stands, watches impassively even as her stomach churns a little bit at the sight of Murphy gagging and struggling against restraints—the physical and biological reaction in her stronger than the oddly detached thoughts going through her head. She doesn’t feel particularly strongly about how she knows this is about to end. The punishment suits the deed and if Murphy did it then he deserves it, and if he was stupid enough to get caught then that goes doubly so.

(If he didn’t do it, then—)

“Stop!” Someone cries out, but the mob is too loud, too wild with energy to notice when they’re hungrily eyeing Murphy’s thrashing and desperate gasps.

Then again, more loudly and shrill in its’ distress: “I said _stop!”_

The hundred who manage to hear her over the chaos turn harshly to the source of the voice—a young girl who looks like she’s barely ten, crying. Confused at the interruption, they settle down as much as can be expected while the remaining hundred reluctantly follow suit. The girl continues, cuts through the tension:

“Stop, it wasn’t him!” She tries again, this time making her presence known by running headlong into the middle of the still angry crowd.

The camp pauses in their lynching but there’s an uneasiness in the air simmering just under the surface, ready to break out into mayhem as everyone stares at the girl in agitation and disbelief and it’s a miracle that they’re even giving that much to her. “It wasn’t him, it was me!”

And then again, quieter in her shame: “It was me…”

The confession brings the rioting back down from confusion to silence and dumb realization, and it isn’t until the girl repeats herself for the third time that somebody—Clarke—regains enough presence of mind to cut Murphy down from his hanging. Once he’s down she turns to Bellamy who’s still standing from where he kicked the stool out, sweating and speechlessly staring at the little girl while looking worse for wear.

“Bellamy!” Clarke yells, trying to get the boy out of his stupor as she works to subdue both the shaken-up crowd and Murphy, who’s rapidly getting his second wind and turning livid to boot. “Bellamy get her out of here! Now!”

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t even hear her and it’s right at that moment that Root decides to step in.

“I got them,” Root offers, grabbing Bellamy by the arm. Despite wanting to stay out of this clusterfuck of misunderstandings and false accusations, she has no desire to see the camp implode. Not when Root still needs them functioning properly.

She quickly drags him away, though he stays uncooperative and unresponsive until she stops to turn abruptly. She shoves at him angrily. “What do you think you’re doing?” Root hisses. “Get it together. They’re all going to turn on themselves after killing that girl if you don’t help, and then what?”

“I _did_ help!” he lashes out at her face, upset all of a sudden. “I think—I think this happened because I told her—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Bellamy! Not exactly the time for self-angst, okay? Have your little cry _after_ we get her out of here, not now when she could very well get mauled by a hundred kids out for blood.”

Bellamy goes from mopey to angry in half a second, but the real and growing threat against the girl’s life does the trick in knocking enough sense into him so that he finally relents. “All right,” he says, quickly refocusing and turning towards the girl who’s (smartly) beginning to back away from the mob in an attempt to make herself invisible again.

“Charlotte,” he calls gently, extending his hand for the girl to take. It would be almost touching if Root couldn’t hear Murphy screaming for her bloody murder in the background over and over.

“Bellamy, come on, we don’t have all day,” she presses.

“Shut up! I got this,” he barks back at her. “Charlotte, we gotta get you out of here. You understand?”

She stares up at them both, watery eyes wide with shock and fear. There’s a second when Root is tempted to just tell Bellamy to get on with it and pick her up, but it never comes to that because eventually Charlotte takes his hand and then they’re all off and running, the sounds of a confused but angry mob following after them and Charlotte’s whispered _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ ringing meaninglessly in their ears.

 

[…]

 

They make it back to camp quickly, but not fast enough that they can pat themselves on the back for it and relax. The rest of the hundred are still hot on their trail and the three of them only have a few minutes worth of a head start at the most, if even that.

Bellamy takes them to his tent. It isn’t the most secure part of the crash site but he’s confident enough that none of the hundred are going to try anything to it while he’s inside. Root isn’t as sure about that but the girl is his responsibility now, so.

She leaves the two of them in the tent when Bellamy starts confronting Charlotte about what she did. Root doesn’t glean much from the bit of their conversation she manages to catch, but apparently Bellamy was right when he said it was partly his fault; he’d told her something about slaying her demons (what kind of advice is that, anyway) and in return the young girl had misinterpreted (and who takes it literally?) it to mean that she had the pass to kill Wells.

...Okay, then.

Root can’t _quite_ follow the logic behind that, but basically, what she gets from it is that they’re in this mess now because of a tangle of extremely unfortunate communicating all around.

Clarke, thankfully, finds her before any of the other remaining delinquents. Root wastes no time in pointing her to where the other two are hiding, and the blonde girl thanks her for it as she rushes past toward Bellamy’s tent.

Fully intending on making herself scarce before the rest of the hundred find them, Root is already on her way to the dropship when Clarke stops to call out her name.

“Hey, Root,” Clarke starts, and _damn it_ because she has a feeling that knows what she’s going to ask of her next and Root’s already meddled in this business way more than she had cared or wanted to.

“What?”

Clarke Griffin doesn’t miss a beat with her request. “When they get here…I need you to keep them back for a while. Just long enough so that we can figure out what to do with the kid.”

She scoffs. “And how exactly do you expect me to keep an entire camp away?”

“Look, just—” Clarke wavers. She looks tired and fed up—like she’s about to start something with Root right then and there but then she takes a breath, shakes it off before she wipes a hand over her face and recomposes herself again. “Just do me this favour, okay?”

She supposes she should be marginally impressed with the way Clarke asks her to put herself between a little girl she barely knows and a horde of children as if it were a minor favour that couldn’t possibly cost Root a black eye and bruised limbs, but Root is mostly just annoyed with herself for still being around for the request. There’s no good and logical reason for her to say yes to being Charlotte’s temporary meat shield, but…

“All right, fine.” Root complies, an idea forming in her head.  “But you owe me for this, Griffin.”

Clarke nods her agreement. She disappears into Bellamy’s tent and Root has no doubt the other girl has more important things on her plate right now than worrying about what she’d just signed herself into, but Root certainly isn’t one to forget about owed favours. Because if Clarke Griffin wants to use her then she should know better than to expect that she won’t want something back in return, and being owed something by the only one in this camp with a semblance of leadership and competency? Well.

Something might just come out of this yet.

 

[…]

 

Some people might call it cheating that as soon as Octavia shows up Root takes her chance to tell her about what’s happening with Bellamy and the girl, but Root just calls it smart and quick thinking because the Blake girl, fueled by her protectiveness for Bellamy, acts as expected and happily takes up Root’s mantle of guard dog for herself, relieving Root and her scrawny frame from all the dangers of standing between a mob and its target.

Root keeps herself a relatively safe distance away, far enough so that she’s not in any immediate physical harm but close enough for her to be able to see if Octavia is in over her head. As far as she can tell the girl’s status as Bellamy’s little sister is doing her all the favours today because the hundred seem equally scared to touch—much less hurt—her as they are to disobey Bellamy.

The thing is, Clarke, Bellamy, and Charlotte can hardly hide inside the tent forever, and neither can a stalemate between one Blake sibling and an entire camp of teenagers last the better part of the day, so it was really only a matter of time before someone inevitably found or forced their way past into the tent.

That someone had to be Murphy, of all people.

He’s inside for all of two seconds before ripping apart the tent entrance and storming back outside, furiously rounding on Octavia as he demands _where are they? I know you know!_ to the poor girl who just laughs and spits at his face because she honestly doesn’t have a clue and she’s just glad the three of them got away.

It isn’t the answer he’s looking for, his dissatisfaction with it escalating into calls for a witch-hunt and before Root can even react he has the camp divided between those running with him and those who have agreed to stay out of his way.

A failure as much as it is short lived, Murphy’s inquisition ends like this: with the ninety-four turning into ninety-three and with camp having two less mouths to feed. It ends with Charlotte dead, with the twelve-year-old having been backed into a corner where that was the only choice she had left to make. It ends with Murphy being exiled from the hundred for being the cause of her suicide, and it ends with the threat of Bellamy’s own hands wringing around his neck should he ever return.

(New rules are put into place as soon as Bellamy and Clarke show up back in camp, the two having—finally—come to an agreement about how to run the camp. They have the right idea but what’s unfortunate about it is that it took no less than a murder, a suicide, and a banishment for either of them to realize that _whatever the hell we want_ was never actually a valid and long-lasting course of action.)

 

[…]

 

“I’ve got it. I—I think I’ve _got it_ ,” Monty blurts out later on that week one night.

He’s tripping over his feet running out of the dropship and shouting for Clarke before Root even has time to process just what he means, and next thing she knows there’s an audience of them all watching Monty as he hooks up Clarke’s working wristband to the dropship.

Monty gives the pliers—and therefore the honour of connecting them all back to the Ark—to Jasper. Jasper remains unconvinced he isn’t cursed with the worst luck of them all but accepts regardless, shaking off his nervousness as he concentrates on not breaking anything in his attempt to regain contact with Ark Station.

Lights in the ship splutter the moment the band makes contact with Jasper’s pliers. A fraction of a second later and Root can feel it—can even _hear_ the shock and burn of their bands overheating draw gasps from the hundred as the frying pieces of metal sear themselves into their skin.

She turns her wrist over then, a dull, dead screen taunting her from her wristband where there used to be a stable blue light, all but giving away that their one and only plan had ended in a massive failure. Again.

Root doesn’t panic. She _doesn’t_. But all of a sudden she just needs to leave the dropship—she just needs air because she needs to think and plan and she’s finding it hard to do either of those while being surrounded by people crushed by the biggest disappointment since their landing.

God fucking _damn_ it.

 

[…]

 

So there it is, then. All of the wristbands are fried and dead.

Root tries to imagine how Earth Monitoring might be making sense of it. Profiles of the hundred would have been up on their system’s monitors. She had designed the interface to be sleek, but user-friendly; one hundred profiles for each criminal, health vitals beside their picture flashing blue for healthy, orange for at-risk, and red for dead before finally turning blank if not resuscitated within a timeframe of ten minutes (which, she had argued with Sinclair, was quite generous, but whatever).

One second there would have been ninety-three profile cards flashing blue and healthy while six blank spaces spread scattered around the screen, and the next…

The next second the remaining profiles would have just all flashed red without warning. Which, Root supposes, is what was supposed to have happened if the Chancellor’s plan of getting rid of them all had actually gone as intended. Earth was supposed to have killed them all on contact, but it didn’t.

Taking the time to reflect on it now, she wonders what Sinclair, or even Councilwoman Griffin, thought when the better chunk of the hundred had survived for a week.

Root sighs. Well that’s all irrelevant now that they’re nothing but empty cards in Earth Monitoring Station.

They’re on their own now, and in hindsight maybe Root should have put less effort into trying to contact the Ark when that was a long shot to begin with and redirected all of that energy into making nice with the Griffin girl. The girl had a gun after all, and bigger brains than apparently the entire camp combined. Minus herself and Monty, obviously.

Shaking her head, she plans for what her next move is going to be.

Logically, Root knows there’s strength in numbers. Staying with the hundred presents its’ fair share of problems though, the most glaring of them being that they have a huge target painted on their backs thanks to Jasper’s ordeal with the Grounders. And that isn’t even going over the obvious disadvantage of them being pathetically unarmed in comparison, or the fact that the hundred are just generally ill-equipped to _deal_ with any sort of real problems, internal and external. The acid fog and Charlotte and Murphy had all proved that.

But then what? She leaves the one hundred, equally unprepared and unarmed herself? For what? If her endgame is staying alive then leaving the group to be picked off isn’t the best way to go about it. Fuck.

There had been a plan in place before everything had gone to shit, hadn’t there? She refocuses on that, thinking of how in the beginning, they were meant to land on Earth and—barring death by radiation—head to Mount Weather. They could still do that. She could still do that much, couldn’t she?

A flash in the sky catches her attention, tears her away from those questions and Root brings her head up to squint against the rising sun to make out a burning streak of light and fire cutting across the clouds; it falls and falls as it nears the surface of the planet on a mission, too close and too big to be a comet but too small and compact to be the Ark.

She gasps at the sight of it, unable to look away (and a deeper part unable to stop formulating possibilities and theories and conclusions). Her chest thumps louder and louder with every beat that the object comes closer to crashing, to impact, to landing, and then—

Fuck it.

Her long legs take off running toward the direction of the falling object as if on automatic. She's unsteady at first but then she sees the thing—whatever the thing is—safely deploying its' parachutes and oh, God, it's enough to fuel her need to master untrained limbs and muscles into obeying her commands of faster, damn you, please, please.

She doesn’t once think to look back in the direction of the camp.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait. I wasn't going to post an update any time soon but then my priorities got turned around (again) when aelysian got into The 100 and insisted I write this. So here I am.
> 
> I wrote parts of this while at work today and so those bits are unbeta'd. Thanks for reading.
> 
> Oh, and. I'll be removing the Root/Shaw tag from this later. I feel like it just gives people false hope that Root/Shaw is happening soon, and...while she'll be making an appearance soon (give me two chapters, I promise), the actual Root/Shaw thing won't be happening for a while yet. So yeah. Heads-up for people who want to keep reading because you won't be seeing updates here in the Root/Shaw ao3 tag after this.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I haven't forgotten about this.
> 
> Again, apologies for the wait, and thank you to twit for fact-checking and beta work. I'm the worst at remembering what actually happened in the show.
> 
> (Any parts that read awkwardly are still completely my fault, though)

Running blindly in the vague direction of a fallen space object is apparently easier than it sounds because by the time Root reaches it there’s already somebody there. That _somebody_ being Clarke somehow, though that fact and the mystery of how she got there before her is easily an afterthought to the _it_ in question undoubtedly being a _pod_.

A pod. She turns the word and thought over and around in her head because there’s an _actual fucking space pod_ sitting not twenty feet from her, and what it is is the help and direction that she’s been so desperately looking for ever since they crashed.

She can hardly believe it. 

If she were the type of person to (she isn’t), she would swear it was a sign. She might be a skeptic by nature, but really, who is she to question it if she just so happens to get a wind of good fortune coming her way right when she needed it most? Because dealing with a week’s worth of bad choices really is about all she can handle.

She catches sight of Clarke moving to open the door and before Root even realizes what she’s doing, she’s making her way down and calling for the other girl to wait up.

Clarke turns, confusion clear on her face. “Root?” She looks over her shoulder, returns to her face with concern in her eyes. “What are you doing here? Is Finn all right?”

She stops, the mention of Finn’s name confusing her more than the question itself. The last time she saw Finn he was storming out of the dropship after the wristband disaster. Why wouldn’t he be okay?

Root shakes her head. “I haven’t seen him. Did he come here with you?”

“You could say that,” she mutters. Sighing, she asks again, “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing as you. Saw a thing in the sky, followed the thing in the sky…”

“Right, sorry. Just…not used to seeing you outside of camp, I guess.”

“Fair enough,” Root shrugs. She doesn’t need to remind Clarke that there hasn’t really been any good reason for her to leave prior to now. She gestures at the door. “Ready for the moment of truth?” 

Clarke nods. They lift the hatch together. The capsule is in bad condition and the entire thing whines and threatens to collapse in on itself as it opens, but Clarke pays no attention to the safety hazards and lets herself in anyway. It happens fast but she barely gets herself halfway in before she has to stop and take a step back at what she sees.

“Oh my god." 

There’s an overbearing silence for a moment, a pause weighted partly by the gravity of the situation and partly by disbelief, because— 

“Hi,” a girl greets from inside, warm and tired and _alive_. “I made it?”

Clarke answers for the both of them. “Yeah,” she confirms with a smile.“Welcome home.” 

 

[…] 

 

There’s something very positive to be said about finally meeting a pretty face that isn’t openly hostile. Their luck up until now had been appallingly bad, so finding out that the pod wasn’t going to pose yet another source of their problems was a nice, welcome discovery. 

Plus she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t a little bit curious about the new girl. She had arrived all by herself, and anyone who could operate a capsule, land on unfamiliar territory, and survive on top of all that is at least worth some of Root’s attention. 

The girl looks almost as beat-up as her ride down to earth, though.

Root tells her that she should probably get her head wounds checked out, and the look of surprise that Clarke shoots her way at the suggestion is almost priceless. 

Please. After the week she’s had, she really has no problems with jumping at the first chance of meeting someone new—outside from the hundred—who didn’t want to kill her. 

Still, excitement is such a fleeting feeling because, naturally, the girl can’t wait to unbuckle and let herself out to breathe _actual air_ for the first time in her life. Root won’t fault her for that, but she’s also already long past the whole experience herself and watching yet another stranger go through the however many stages of wonder isn’t really something she’s up for doing. Not that she has a choice about it.  

The girl wastes no time in shedding the space suit she’s wearing, marvelling all the while at the rain that’s started to fall outside. “Is that rain?”

“Oh, yeah,” Root quips as she leans on the doorframe, boredom already beginning to creep up on the edges of her initial enthusiasm. “You’ll especially love it when it pours for the entire day and literally everything you’re stepping on feels like it wants to drag you under and swallow you whole.”

Clarke rolls her eyes. “Don’t mind her, she doesn’t get out much.” 

Well that’s not a lie, but she still feels strangely compelled to defend herself. “I get out enough. I’m just saying to enjoy it while you can because you’ll be getting more than enough of it soon.”

“This is amazing! What else is down here?”

She has half a mind to say _not electronics that’s for damn sure_ but before she can be all sarcastic about it, Clarke tells her all about the pretty rivers and glowing butterflies and nothing at all about the acid fog or the Grounders trying to kill them. Thanks for that, Griffin. Way to save the best news for last for the new girl.  

She raises an eyebrow at Clarke once she’s done trying to practically sell Earth with her descriptions, and to her credit she does kind of look guilty about it, mouthing _later_ at Root as soon as the other girl turns away from them. 

Good. _Later_ better be right because Root is _not_  going to be the one who breaks it to her. 

Root watches and takes her place in the seat as the girl takes her first tentative steps out of the pod. She spins and turns on her feet carefully and takes everything in with a lightness about her and sometimes Root wishes she could be the better person and be more patient because while she’s…surprised at how pleased she actually feels that someone else survived the trip down, all three of them honestly have other things that need doing.

She moves her attention to the insides of the pod. It looks…second-hand, if she’s being charitable, but that’s to be expected. Still, most of what’s inside looks more or less fine save for the damage one would expect from atmospheric entry. Her and Monty are going to have to work out what they’re going to do with this thing because she has no doubt that _they’re_ going to be the ones gutting it for parts. 

Oh, well. At least there won’t be a problem with them both agreeing that getting their hands on its radio should be their priority.

Her eyes rove over the console, freezing when she notices all the frayed wires dangling over to its left, something having been clearly torn out. She frowns. She’s pretty sure that’s where the radio was supposed to be sitting… 

Root scrambles across and under the terminal in search of the missing piece. She comes up empty and curses, doubling back to frantically turn around in her seat and check behind her while she tries not to be angry at the ever increasing possibility that they’ve just been screwed over _again_.

It isn’t there either.

 

[…]

 

Root races out of the pod. Fully intending on sharing her discovery with the other two, she has to force herself to stop when she sees Clarke staring ahead with a spaced-out, blank expression. It’s a look she’s never seen on her previously, and just for that Root follows her line of sight, landing on the newcomer girl who has relief written all over her face as she rushes over to a figure making its way over.

“Finn!” She yells, and the figure—Finn, apparently, though how Root couldn’t recognize him at first by the distinct way his floppy hair frames his face is kind of shameful—looks up at the name.

He looks everything but relieved. 

“Raven?” He says weakly, face paling.

The girl—Raven—beams, engaging him in an hard embrace that takes him by surprise. She puts her whole weight into the contact and Finn just stands there, nearly losing his balance before seemingly remembering that he has arms that he’s supposed to be doing something with.

It’s a suspiciously one-sided looking hug, though clearly the two have history. And clearly that _history_ is more literal to one of them than it is to the other because Finn just blinks when Raven moves forward and flat out kisses him like the long-lost lovers she seems to think they are. 

(It’s been, like, a week at most.)

He pulls away and turns them around, making eye contact with Clarke that practically spews with _feelings_ and _meaning_ even as he holds Raven and tells her _he’s so glad to see her_ and Clarke just keeps his gaze with an impassive expression while saying nothing and Root has seriously had enough of this shit.

Everyone is a child. Everyone around her is a child and that’s the only answer she can come up with that can reasonably explain _why_ she finds herself having to bear witness to people being stupid over and over and over again.

“If we’re done with the lovely introductions,” she interrupts rudely, “there’s a missing radio I’d like to bring to everyone’s attention.”

“What are you talking about?” Raven asks, peeling herself off Finn to check the pod herself. “I was using it when I left the Ark.”

“Well it’s not there now. Take a look for yourself.”

“That can’t be. I—Oh, _shit_ ,” Raven says, smacking the pod when she sees that Root wasn’t lying. “I just remembered—we need to find that radio.”

“Someone must have taken it,” Clarke offers, taking the opportunity to speak as soon as the attention shifts away from Raven and Finn’s confusing romantic entanglements. “If it wasn’t you, then someone else who got here ahead of us. You don’t remember seeing anybody else?”

Raven shakes her head. “No, I—I was kind of out of it. But, listen,” she starts, grabbing Clarke by the arm in a desperate motion. “We need to find that radio. Doctor Griffin’s waiting to hear back, and—”

“Doctor Griffin? My _mom_?” Clarke’s voice turns to ice. “What does she have to do with anything?”

Raven’s face lights up for a second. “Oh. You’re Clarke? Abby, she—“

“What does she want, Raven?”

She bites a lip before sighing. “Long story short? I wasn’t sent here by the Chancellor. I’m not—I wasn’t sent here as help from the Ark.”

The three of them stay quiet, wait for Raven to continue. Maybe Raven's head injury is worse than it looks because who the hell else has the clearance to launch a ship to Earth but the Chancellor, and what the hell is she even there for if not to help?

“I was sent by Doctor Abby Griffin.”

 

[…]

 

Clarke doesn’t take the news well. 

She responds rather poorly, actually, becoming curt and irritable despite her efforts to keep her cool. Root can’t tell if the reason for that is because she has some ongoing feud with her mother she doesn’t know about, or if it’s because Raven just dropped the news that the only reason she’s there is because the Council had green lighted plans to sacrifice 300 people to prolong oxygen supply and Councilwoman Griffin wasn’t having any of it. Likely both.

In a valiant attempt to convince the Chancellor to land the Ark on Earth instead, she had put all her faith in Raven, sending her down to confirm that the planet was habitable and that the hundred were alive.

(At which point, Root had pointed out the Councilwoman had no reason to think they were alive given how the remaining wristbands had short-circuited. Raven had simply said that Abigail Griffin _believed_ , and never in her life had Root internally rolled her eyes so fast before.) 

It was a decent plan. Running on the assumption that Raven’s radio was still working, the plan would have worked perfectly if someone hadn’t made off with the radio (Clarke and Root had taken one look at each other and known _exactly_ who it was because Bellamy has had it in for them from the beginning, and now he’s the entire reason they were making this dumb trip back to the crash site when they could have reached the Ark by now). 

Although apparently the thought that Raven’s communications systems might go down just as the hundred’s did hadn’t crossed the Councilwoman’s mind. Ah, in-council fighting at its finest. So short-sighted.

Kind of like Finn right now with his constant attempts to apologize to Clarke while she struggles to keep civil and come up with twenty different ways to tell him to settle down. The poor girl. Root doesn’t know exactly what Finn is apologizing for, but she has one very good guess that she’s pretty sure would hit the nail right on the head.

Maybe she’ll take pity on her. An irate Clarke is the last thing the camp needs right now, anyway. 

“Clarke, a word?” She ventures, and the speed at which Clarke apologizes to Finn before abandoning him and running to Root’s side is amazing.

“Thanks,” Clarke says as they continue walking ahead together silently. They couldn’t make it any more obvious they weren’t actually intending to discuss anything if they tried. 

“Sure,” Root nods. She spares one last look at Finn, who finally gets the hint and goes back to attend to Raven. The two of them start falling behind judging from their fading voices, but even from this distance Root can’t help but overhear their conversations:

“Not that I’m not glad, but how did you even get here?”

“What do you mean _how_? Ten days away and you’ve already forgotten I’m a genius?”

“Raven, come on. You just happened to steal a space pod from right under the Chancellor’s nose? You might be a genius but you’re not _that_ good of a thief.”

“You’d never know. The best thief in the galaxy wouldn’t be known for it, would they?” Raven says smartly, and Root smiles despite herself.

“Seriously.”

“Well, since you made the grave mistake of underestimating your own girlfriend—“

“—okay. Here we go.” 

“—I’ll have you know that Abby tasked me with performing a miracle and gave me that sorry excuse of a pod to retrofit. In ten days.”

“Really?”

Clarke gives Root an odd look and Root pauses for a second before deciding to ignore it.

“No.”

“Raven…“

“Wow, you are really not about the jokes today, are you?” A pause and an exasperated groan. “All right, fine. She gave me ten days to do it and then went back on her word and had me do it in five. How’s that for you?”

Root can practically _hear_ the smug smirk on her face. It would be annoying if Root didn’t have something else occupying her thoughts. Like how retrofitting an entire escape pod that was likely over a hundred years old _would_ count as a miracle, as Raven had pointed out. And all by herself, too.

Impressive is what it is. Or rather, what it would be, if Raven wasn’t lying. She doesn’t know enough about the girl to know if she’s telling the truth or not, and that train of thought only makes Root realize that she _is_ actually interested in knowing more.

A pat on her back has her coming out of her musings, watching after Clarke as she walks on ahead with a small smile.

Root walks faster, her longer strides catching up in a matter of seconds. “What?” 

“Nothing,” Clarke says vaguely.

 

[…]

 

What ends up working against Bellamy is that he’s so high profile within the hundred that half the camp knows his exact whereabouts at any given time. That certainly makes their job of finding him a lot easier, though Root’s satisfaction when they do finally locate him is cut in half because it becomes painfully obvious he wasn’t trying very hard to avoid them in the first place.

True to pattern, things go downhill from the moment they find him.

It’s fine, at first, when all he does is try to act innocent. But then Bellamy’s name gets dropped somewhere in the conversation and then it _isn’t_ fine and next thing she knows, they’re listening to Raven explaining that the entire Ark is hunting him down for shooting the Chancellor.   

So in other words, he’s an actively wanted criminal. And not in the way the rest of the hundred are.

It all makes sense after that, why Bellamy was so insistent on disabling the wristbands and why he was so against getting help from the Ark, because if the Council ever made it down then he’d be executed on the spot. And that’s if he was lucky.

But that’s not her problem. What _is_ kind of her problem is the fact that Raven is getting into it with Bellamy, and even though Root would absolutely love nothing more than to see him get his ass kicked by the new girl, she doubts that it’d make him tell them what they really need to know.

Still, Root almost wants to laugh at the display in front of her—of a girl half a head shorter than Bellamy, relentless in her demands to know where he hid her radio and being successful in her aggressive attempts to corner him into a tree. It’s then that he finally stands up for himself and responds to her advances by telling them all that _it’s too late_ and that he should have killed Raven when he had the chance. 

It’s the wrong thing to say. Raven rises to the challenge, baiting him with taunts of _well I’m right here_ until Clarke steps in and steers them away from a near three-way knife fight between Raven, Bellamy, and Finn by telling them to cut it out.

“What the hell do you mean _it’s too late_? Bellamy, what did you do?”

Root snarks from the side, “You mean apart from shooting the Chancellor and taking the radio?”

Bellamy ignores her. “Exactly what it means, princess. The radio is gone. Just give it up.”

“Just _give it up_? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Three hundred people are going to die on the Ark because of you. Because you were selfish enough to throw away three hundred lives to save your own skin after killing Jaha!”

“Jaha isn’t dead,” Raven breaks in, and Bellamy freezes as soon as she says it.

“ _What?_ ”

“Yeah,” she says. Her face is deadpan and unimpressed and it mirrors Root’s thoughts about this whole situation with Bellamy exactly. “You’re a lousy shot.”

 

[…]

 

He threw it in a river. 

After some rather manipulative plays made by Clarke regarding Bellamy and his continued ability to protect Octavia, Bellamy had finally spilled that he had thrown the radio into a river. And to say that Root is furious would be—

Well. Not wholly accurate. She’s angry, of course. She’s angry and as a result she thinks even less of Bellamy than what little she’d started with, but the word _furious_ would more accurately describe Raven. Raven, who’s grumbling miserably next to Root about how the radio never should have been taken in the first place as she gets her clothes and lower half soaked in her search of the riverbank for a puny little radio.

Root couldn’t agree with her more.

“Who the hell does he think he is!” Raven bursts, not caring that she’s being loud enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear. Including Bellamy. 

“Oh, I’ve been asking that ever since we landed,” Root pipes up as she fishes out of the water what she had _thought_ was the radio but was actually a suspiciously box-shaped rock. She throws it back in with a sigh. They’ll be at this all day at this rate.

“I can’t. You’ve been with him for a week, right? How has he not been slapped yet?”

Root smiles. Oh, she likes this girl. “Sheer force of will, probably. That, or everyone’s scared of him since he’s pretty much declared himself the alpha male of camp.” 

“The _alpha_?” Raven asks incredulously, and Root can’t help her there because she doesn’t get it either.

“Boys will be boys?”

“Hey! Is this it?” Miller interrupts, calling for them and gesturing at a device in his hands.

They wade through the water, fighting to keep their balance against the current and for someone who literally landed on Earth just a few hours ago, Raven is handling the elements surprisingly well. She gets to Miller first, inspects the object in his hands. “Yeah, that’s it.” Raven nods bitterly. “That’s my radio in all its water-damaged glory.” 

Bellamy scoffs but doesn’t say anything.

“Can you fix it?” Clarke asks, ignoring the obvious jab at Bellamy. 

“Don’t know. Maybe. Might be a while.”

“How _much_ longer, Raven?”

“Half a day? Few days, maybe? I’d have to dry it out first to see the damage. Then I’d need replacement parts, most likely. You got anything good for me?”

“I wouldn’t call them good but I might have something,” Root offers. “Scrounged around for parts when we first crashed. Monty and I used some of them for the wristbands but there are plenty left in camp that might still be useful.”

“Good,” Clarke says. “Problem is, we don’t _have_ a few days to reach the Ark. They’ll be killing those people the first chance they get, so what we need is a way to contact the Ark now.”

Raven steps forward, holding a hand up thoughtfully. “Hang on. We don’t need to talk to the Ark.”

“What are you—“

“—We just need to _show_ them we’re here.”

 

[…]

 

A minute into hearing Raven’s plan and Root has less and less doubts about this girl being capable of refurbishing an escape pod all by herself. 

Fortunately for them all, Raven had the gift of foresight and had her pod equipped with emergency flares. Or maybe it had already come with them, whatever, but either way the point is that Raven’s idea to set her flares off for someone from the Ark to see is a rather handy solution to their current problem.

Of course, they still needed something powerful enough to launch the flares that far up, but Raven once again steps up for them by offering up her pod to strip down for parts to build a rocket launcher with.

Yep. A rocket launcher. Root is a genius but even _she_ would never. Not that she even could, and that’s the thought that sends away the last of her doubts about Raven and makes her decide that she wants to keep the girl around. For practical reasons. Because the last thing that Root wants to happen is for both of them to lose their edges thanks to having no one else to be around other than people whose usefulness in camp barely extended past lugging crap around under Bellamy’s orders. 

Frustratingly enough, it’s Bellamy himself who’s getting nothing done as he goes around like a brute demanding to know if anyone’s seen Octavia. Raven and Root are working on putting parts together for the launcher when he goes up to them, and they send him on his way with a more than hostile _no_ , eager to get him out of their hairs and the launcher finished before the day’s end. 

Eventually, Clarke approaches them asking how the process is going. 

“Good. Should be done in a few hours,” Raven says, turning around. Root pauses in her work to follow after her and they both catch a slight frown on Clarke’s face that Raven mistakes for skepticism. “It’ll work, Clarke. Root and I have got it handled here and I know your mom will be watching.”

“Hm.”

“Hey.” Raven steps forward, putting a hand on Clarke’s arm. It’s supposed to be comforting but the expression on Clarke’s face barely changes. “I’m serious. Your mom loves you and you’re really lucky to have that. She’ll be watching for it.”

“Right,” Clarke replies in a low voice. She offers a stiff smile before turning to Root. “Let me know once it’s done?”

She nods, knowing better than to question Clarke’s mood swings by now. “Yeah, sure.” 

As soon as Clarke is out of earshot, Raven turns toward her. “Okay, does she hate me?”

“Probably not,” she says. She tries to keep her voice light but it’s not enough to get Raven to stop from shooting her a glare. Root sighs. “Look, she’s just like that. She always acts like she’s got a stick up her ass because somebody around here has to be that person and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.”

“Huh… All right. Well, if you’re sure.”

She isn’t, but Raven doesn’t need to know that.

 

[…]

 

They make good on their promised time and manage to light the flares up by nightfall. Raven and the rest of the hundred are outside dotted about camp, staring up at the sky as the rockets light up and flash brightly once, twice, before making an angry crackling sound that Root swears she can feel right down to her toes. 

Among them on the ground there’s a sense of awe as the remaining embers come down and leave long, trailing cinders in their wake on the backdrop of the night. It’s oddly calming, and out of curiosity Root pulls her eyes away to study the people around her, all paired up or huddled together—even Clarke—with new friends or loved ones or whatever other support unit they’d managed to build for themselves that Root hadn’t cared or wanted enough to create for herself.

There’s a tug on her chest that she allows herself to feel momentarily—a pull that’s both demanding and heavy after being ignored for so long—and were she any less practiced at being alone and not caring she thinks that she would have been crushed with the feeling.

Instead, she lets it wash over her, loneliness lapping at her feet. She lets herself remember her mother, and Hanna, their time together and the things she learned and the things she felt, how it was all enough and not nearly enough. She lets herself wonder if, despite everything else she believes, she would consider herself lucky if she ever found her way to those things again.

And then she lets it go.

 


End file.
